As the gaming floors in today's gaming venues continue to expand, the need to monitor and secure devices in that venue becomes a critical component of the informational technology infrastructure. Gaming providers continually look for new and better ways to manage this rapidly expanding inventory in a cost effective manner. As the numbers of devices in a venue increases, the ability to track device locations, identify andlor predict environmental and performance conditions that might lead to failures and to change components rapidly to avoid or fix problems can significantly increase revenues.
The ability to track shipments of gaming devices would alleviate some of this problem. With players demanding more variety and higher levels of entertainment, the ability to move machines within a venue, as well as reconfigure machines to add upgraded components or software should be made easier and more reliable.
In an industry where revenue depends upon the amount of time a device is operational, the ability to monitor, predict, and initiate preventive measures in order to maximize up time is crucial. The ability to perform real time monitoring of environmental conditions within a device, the ability to poll and monitor factors such as CPU performance/load, fan speeds, CPU temperatures, system/memory faults; all may provide valuable data trends that may be utilized to perform predictive analysis and inform/dispatch service personnel before a gaming device faults and is taken offline.
In efforts to further maximize uptime and reduce costs, it would be helpful to be able to easily interface individual components with the master game controller, and to rapidly change out components.